The majority of music enthusiasts and musicians play musical instruments with various success. Most of these players have the talent and ear for the creation of new musical works or for the rearrangement of existing works with new ideas and sound effects. However, many successful musicians are not able to play their own compositions on the piano or organ despite their musical talents. The virtuosity of the play depends upon the time spent for exercise and the coordination ability of the performer. Also, to perform on any musical instrument for an orchestrated reproduction of a complex work is not possible by only only one person. The steps to be taken between the manuscript and the final recording consumes a large amount of time, and typically requires the cooperation of other musicians, and the involvement of technical experts and their accompanying expenses which are not available for most talents.
The first trials of the performance of a musical composition often uncover imperfections in some parts of the composition, especially in the arrangement of the instrumentation. The correction of the manuscript, the intimidation of the changed sections, greatly extends the time of the production.
The recording or the taping of the final work presents similarly expensive and time consuming difficulties. A mistake of one participating musician usually forces the retaping of the corresponding movement or often the entire composition with the participation of the whole orchestra.
Similarly, the player of an individual musical instrument is not able to erase, for example, misplaced notes from the recording. The necessity of a new recording from the beginning to the end is obvious.
This invention represents a device which eliminates the costly and timely way of the audible realization of a musical work as described above.
It is the main object of the invention to provide an audible reproduction of any musical composition, from single melodies to the most complex orchestration, directly from an ordinary strip of paper written by the musician himself. The object of this invention is carried out by a device which reads the strip of paper and controls the play of notes.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,213,179 CLAUSON describes an electro-optical system for pitch or tone character control. Slots and holes punched in a card or slip and representing individual notes of a composition move past a light source; the moving slip is surfaced on a series of photoelectric sensors connected to the corresponding tone generator of an organ. The card or slip is opaque to the light except for the punched holes through which the corresponding photoelement is irradiated for the activation of a tone. A similar electro-optical system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,535,973 ROSEN (FIG. 8). The transparent record base 80 containing opaque dots or squares 88 cemented or drawn with a heavy grease marker onto its surface. The record base moves between light source 84 and photosensors 90. The patent suggests the use of "negative photoelements"--not in existence on the market--or electric (electronic) inversers for triggering sounds.
The disadvantages of the known photoelectrical systems result from the large number of tones they must be capable of handling. For example, a medium-sized electronic organ for home entertainment has a manually operable set of 120 keys and 13 pedals. Correspondingly, the slotted slip must have, or be able to accept, 133 rows of punched or marked directions. If the sensing photoelements are correspondingly arranged in one row, the width of a paper slip is 133 times the dimension of one common photoelement (5 mm diameter). Such a strip would be over 66 cm (2 ft.) wide. The inherent weakness of a structure such as a slotted slip, as well as the enormous size of such a transparent record base is obvious.
To reduce the width of the strip and, therefore, reduce the dimensions of the device, it is necessary to rearrange the photoelements into several rows. In this case, the activator light must be individually guided from each row of slots to the corresponding photoelement through transparent light channels. The complexity and difficulty arises from the production, assembly and adjustment of such a system. The developed heat of the necessary intense light source poses a cooling problem, making such a system uneconomical and quite impractical.
Spring wires or brushes for slip contact are not practical for close geometrical arrangements. Such an arrangement shown by the illustrations on FIG. 1 of U.S. Pat. No. 3,015,979 M. DAVIS and on FIG. 6-FIG. 7 of U.S. Pat. No. 3,535,973 ROSEN, collects debris of all kind from the drawn marks or from the immersed metal bits of the individual notes. Such a short circuit condition between the sensors causes a continuous activation or malfunction on one or more of the tone generators which results in destructive sound effects of the composition. Also, the production of such contact pairs with the desired springiness for the continuous tracking of the conductive markes is slow, complicated and extremely expensive. Also to be considered is service and cleaning of the sensors without damaging the device due to the crowded conditions of its possible smallest dimension between adjacent sensors.